The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), an international media watchdog, has documented the imprisonment of Asif Sultan, a Kashmiri journalist, in its annual global survey, CPJ’s 2020 prison census.
The report noted that Sultan, who was working with a regional magazine Kashmir Narrator, has been imprisoned since 27 August 2018. “In February 2019, police filed a charge sheet accusing him of harboring militants,” Sultan’s profile at the CPJ reads. “He is detained at the Srinagar Central Jail as his case proceeds through the courts.”
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In the report, the CPJ has also included three other Indian journalists, who were incarcerated recently, in 2020, including, Sidhique Kappan, Gautam Navlakha, and Anand Teltumbde.
The CPJ recorded at least 274 journalists in jail in relation to their work on 1 December 2020, exceeding the high of 272 in 2016 “as governments clamped down on news coverage of civil unrest and the coronavirus pandemic”.
